Off the beaten path: The Organ Music of Howard Skempton
Matthew Owens
Howard Skempton is recognised as one of the UK’s most renowned and respected living composers. Born in Chester in 1947, he has also had a career as an academic (he currently lectures in composition at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire), as an accordionist, and as a pianist. He has also worked as a music publisher. His music has fascinated me for nearly 30 years, during which time I have had the privilege and pleasure of commissioning and working with this experimentalist composer on numerous projects, both as a solo organist and as a conductor.
My first encounter with Skempton’s music and specifically his writing for organ was Nature’s Fire, a piece he wrote for Kevin Bowyer in 1994. I was immediately intrigued by this work and programmed it in a recital during a contemporary music festival at The Queen’s College, Oxford, where I had been Organ Scholar.
Over the next few years I came to realise that in the same way that Oliver Messiaen’s music is instantly recognisable, so too is Howard Skempton’s. His music unnerves and even perplexes some listeners through its seemingly simple style, perhaps in a similar way that Erik Satie unnerved listeners with his original style of writing for the piano in the late 1800s and early 1900s. As with so many composers, Skempton’s music is worthy of further exploration in order to appreciate and understand it.
